The CPT report published on 8 September 2026 describes worsening overcrowding, prisoners sleeping on the floor and serious gaps in healthcare. It does not establish an Article 3 violation by itself, but it can be powerful objective evidence.
On 8 September 2026, the Council of Europe's European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment — the CPT — published its latest report on Belgium.
The report follows a periodic visit carried out from 15 to 26 May 2025, during which the CPT inspected prisons and forensic psychiatric facilities in Belgium.
Its findings are serious.
They also arrive at an important moment for Belgian Article 3 litigation.
The CPT found that Belgium's prison population continued to increase despite measures intended to alleviate overcrowding.
An increasing number of prisoners and internees were sleeping on mattresses on the floor.
Many had less than four square metres of personal living space.
The Committee described prison overcrowding as a longstanding structural problem which was accelerating the deterioration of detention and working conditions, increasing tensions and creating serious difficulties in access to healthcare and psychosocial services.
The CPT President warned that the consequences of overcrowding were worsening and that deteriorating conditions risked exposing prisoners to inhuman and degrading treatment.
These are not marginal observations.
They concern the fundamental conditions under which the State deprives people of their liberty.
The importance of the report lies partly in demonstrating that overcrowding cannot be reduced to a question of square metres.
The CPT documented consequences throughout the prison system.
Staff shortages affected the ability of detainees to attend medical consultations, court hearings and activities.
Because of understaffing, the legally required minimum service was rarely guaranteed during days of industrial action and was often unattainable even under ordinary conditions.
Healthcare deficiencies were particularly serious in addiction treatment and psychiatry.
The CPT also received more allegations of physical ill-treatment and verbal abuse during its 2025 visit than during previous visits and identified problems of inter-prisoner violence in the establishments visited.
The picture is therefore cumulative.
Overcrowding affects space.
But it also affects healthcare, activities, security, staff-prisoner relations, access to services and the general living environment.
That is highly relevant to Article 3.
An important legal distinction must nevertheless be maintained.
A finding that conditions fall below CPT standards does not automatically mean that the European Court of Human Rights will find a violation of Article 3.
The CPT performs a preventive function.
Its task is to identify risks and improve the treatment of persons deprived of their liberty before conditions reach the level of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment.
The European Court performs a different judicial function.
In an individual case, Strasbourg determines whether the minimum level of severity required by Article 3 has actually been crossed.
The two standards therefore interact, but they are not identical.
This distinction is important because the CPT report cannot simply replace an individual legal assessment.
The fact that the CPT does not itself decide Article 3 violations does not make its findings legally irrelevant.
Quite the opposite.
Independent monitoring reports can provide highly important objective evidence concerning the environment in which an individual detainee was held.
Suppose a prisoner alleges:
The national court must still establish what that individual actually experienced.
But where those allegations correspond to recent independent findings concerning the same prison system — or potentially the same establishment — the context changes.
The allegations are no longer assessed in a factual vacuum.
The CPT report was published only three weeks after the Belgian Court of Cassation delivered an important judgment concerning Article 3 and detention conditions.
Relying on the case-law of the European Court, the Court of Cassation held on 18 August 2026 that the mere fact that a toilet in a shared cell is not fully separated from the living area does not in itself necessarily breach Article 3, but that the judge must examine whether other conditions of detention have a reinforcing or cumulative effect.
It quashed in part a judgment of the Indictment Chamber of the Ghent Court of Appeal which had not carried out that examination for a pre-trial detainee whose in-cell toilet was screened only by a curtain.
That makes the CPT findings especially relevant.
The CPT itself observed that most in-cell toilets in the prisons visited were inadequately partitioned and that, in combination with other elements such as overcrowding and limited time out of cell, this may very well be considered degrading treatment.
If the legal test requires courts to examine the combined reality of detention, recent independent evidence concerning overcrowding, staffing, healthcare, violence and living conditions may form an important part of the factual context.
A court examining toilet privacy cannot necessarily ignore overcrowding.
A court examining personal space cannot necessarily ignore the length of confinement.
A court examining medical care cannot necessarily ignore systemic staffing problems.
The Convention analysis is individual.
But the environment is structural.
The CPT also expressed significant concern about prisoners with severe mental-health disorders.
It reiterated that persons with severe mental health disorders, such as acute psychosis or major depression, particularly where associated with acute suicidal intention, should not be kept in a standard prison setting but should be immediately referred to a civil psychiatric hospital or to a dedicated psychiatric facility within the prison system.
It also identified deficiencies in psychiatric care and addiction treatment.
For Convention litigation, vulnerability can be crucial.
Conditions which might remain below the Article 3 threshold for one detainee may have a substantially more serious impact on another person because of medical or psychiatric vulnerability.
The individual condition of the prisoner therefore cannot be separated from the conditions in which the State chooses to detain that person.
This leads to the central legal issue.
The CPT report should not be used to argue:
Belgian prisons have structural problems; therefore every Belgian prisoner is automatically subjected to treatment contrary to Article 3.
That would go too far.
The stronger argument is:
Where an individual detainee provides a concrete and credible description of Convention-incompatible conditions, recent independent evidence of serious structural deficiencies can materially reinforce that claim.
That is a much more precise use of the report.
It respects the individual nature of Article 3 litigation while recognising the evidential importance of structural reality.
The report published on 8 September 2026 adds an important new piece to the Belgian detention landscape.
It comes from the Council of Europe's specialised independent monitoring body.
It describes continuing overcrowding, prisoners sleeping on floors, insufficient personal space, staffing problems, obstacles to healthcare, violence and psychiatric-care deficiencies.
Belgian judges remain responsible for determining the individual facts of each case.
But those determinations now take place against a documented contemporary background.
Where a detainee raises a detailed Article 3 complaint, that background cannot simply be treated as irrelevant.
The CPT does not decide cases.
The European Court of Human Rights does.
But the two systems are connected by a common objective: ensuring that deprivation of liberty remains compatible with human dignity.
For Belgian practitioners, the latest report therefore has significance beyond prison policy.
It may become an important evidential source in national proceedings and, where domestic protection ultimately proves insufficient, in subsequent Strasbourg litigation.
The question is not whether a CPT report automatically establishes a Convention violation.
It does not.
The question is whether courts can properly assess an individual Article 3 complaint without taking seriously recent, independent evidence describing the broader conditions in which that person was detained.
Article 3 remains an individual legal test. But individual detention does not take place in a factual vacuum.
These notes are general information on Convention law; they do not constitute legal advice and do not create a lawyer-client relationship.
After the final decision of the highest national court, a case may be submitted to us directly, by the client or by national counsel.